- Actively drive release planning with development, QA, and operations teams, ensuring alignment to release achievements.
- Collaborate with development, QA, and operations teams to plan and coordinate continuous software releases.
- Define and implement clear release scope, schedule, and dependencies to ensure timely and smooth deployments.
- Create and submit change records for process and audit compliance. Participate in Technical Change Advisory and Review Boards.
- Involvement in planning, testing, tracking, release, deployment, communication, and risk management.
- Supervise all aspects of the release lifecycle from planning to execution, ensuring accountability across teams.
- Coordinate and participate actively in planned downtimes. Contribute to root cause analysis and report on release outages and active release upgrades.
- Proactively identify blockers and risks, driving timely resolutions.
- Ensure rigorous adherence to change, testing, and deployment policies before approving production releases.
- Oversee planned downtimes and ensure that releases meet operational reliability standards.
- Own and drive root cause analysis (RCA) efforts for any release outages or failures.
- Push teams towards achieving higher efficiency and quality through automation and process improvements.
Release Automation & Environment Management:
- Champion CI/CD best practices, ensuring efficient automated deployments via AWS CI/CD, GitLab CI/CD, or similar tools.
- Manage version control repositories, ensuring branching strategies to minimize conflicts and ensure stability.
- Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices using tools like Terraform, Morpheus, or CloudFormation.
- Lead various development, testing, staging, and production environments, ensuring consistency and reliability.
Quality Assurance & Continuous Improvement:
- Establish and implement quality gates in collaboration with QA teams.
- Drive continuous improvement initiatives to refine release processes, minimizing defects and deployment risks.
- Analyze trends from past releases and implement measurable improvements.
Communication & Stakeholder Management:
- Act as the central point of accountability for release readiness and execution.
- Provide real-time transparency into release status, risks, and mitigation plans.
- Ensure clear and timely communication of release schedules, changes, and impact assessments.
Incident Management:
- Work closely with SRE teams to address any post-release incidents or issues, contributing to rapid resolution and root cause analysis.
- Provide immediate report out to leadership on findings and next steps.
Required Qualifications:
- Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or related fields.
- 5-8 years of validated experience as a DevOps Release Manager or similar role in a fast-paced software development environment.
- Proven understanding of DevOps practices, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and related tools.
- Proficiency in CI/CD tools such as AWS CI/CD, GitLab CI/CD, or others.
- Hands-on experience with version control systems (AWS Code Commit, Git, SVN) and branching strategies.
- Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like CloudFormation, Terraform, Morpheus.
- Understanding of Agile methodologies and their application in release management.
- Proven ability to coordinate multi-functional work teams toward task completion.
- Effective leadership and analytical skills.
- Strong written, verbal communication skills.
- Problem-solving skills and ability to adapt to evolving requirements.
Preferred Qualifications:
- 8-10 years of experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (e.g., EKS, ECS, Docker, Kubernetes).
- Relevant certifications in DevOps or related fields are a plus.
- SAFE Agile RTE certification or Scaled Agile SAFE certification.
